User blog:Fenrix1958/Book Club - The History and Evolution of Horror
I've been asked to chat a bit about my horror book club. We are currently making a journey through the history and evolution of horror. We started out as a Stephen King book club. In this group of friends, we would frequently close out a party discussing horror literature, in particular Stephen King, yet we could find no single book that all of us had read. So we decided to close that gap, pick our favorites, and work through an assemblage of his best work. After a couple other incarnations, we have returned to horror. Partially because that's where we started, and partially to have an excuse to dig more effectively into that "to read" pile of classics. We wanted to trace the roots of horror from the gothics to our modern era. We broke the timeline into four major segments: #Gothic Precursors and Pulp: To World War 2 #The Next Generation and the Atomic Age: Post-WW2 through the early 60's #Rise of the King: The 70's through the 90's #Post-King: Our current millennium We smooshed the gothic and the pulp together so we could recover stylistically and didn't quit either era too soon. The rest cover fairly distinct eras of horror fiction. We developed a master list of books, and we voted on specific books two months out. A few books were selected as critical so kept coming up on the polls, and we couldn't leave an era until all the critical books were checked off. The master book list looked something like this: Gothic Precursors and Pulp: #Frankenstein by Mary Shelley 1818 #The Stress of Her Regard by Tim Powers 1989 (as a response to Frankenstein) #Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) #*The Fall of the House of Usher #*The Pit and the Pendulum #*The Cask of Amontillado #*The Tell-Tale Heart #*The Masque of the Red Death #*Hop-Frog #*The Raven #*The Facts In The Case Of M. Valdemar #*Ligeia #*Bells #Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) http://www.ambrosebierce.org/works.html #*The Suitable Surroundings #*An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge #*Chickamauga #*The Night Doings at “Deadman’s” #*The Coup de Grace #*The Moonlit Road #*The Death of Halpin Frayser #*Oil of Dog #*The City of the Gone Away #Robert W. Chambers (1865-1933) #*(with An Inhabitant of Carcosa by Bierce) #*The King in Yellow #**"The Repairer of Reputations" #**"The Mask" #**"In the Court of the Dragon" #**"The Yellow Sign" #**"The Demoiselle d'Ys" #*plus The Harbour-Master #A Season in Carcosa or Casilda’s Song (Modern King in Yellow response) #Lord Dunsany #*The Book of Wonder #*THE TROUBLE IN LEAFY GREEN STREET #August Heat by William Fryer Harvey #M. R. James 1904 #*THE ASH-TREE #*OH, WHISTLE, AND I'LL COME TO YOU, MY LAD #*CASTING THE RUNES #*A WARNING TO THE CURIOUS #*THE MEZZOTINT #*COUNT MAGNUS #*CANON ALBERIC'S SCRAP-BOOK #*The Wailing Well #*Preface to More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary #The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton 1904-1937 #A selection of Lovecraft (1890-1937) #*The Damned Thing by Ambrose Bierce #*The Dunwich Horror (pair with The Damned Thing by Bierce) #*The Call of Cthulhu #*The Shadow Over Innsmouth #*Herbert West, Reanimator #*The Haunter of the Dark #*Pickman’s Model #*The Dreams in the Witch House #*The Lurking Fear #*The Music of Erich Zann #*The Colour Out of Space #*The Rats in the Walls #*At The Mountains of Madness #*The Festival #*The Cats of Ulthar #She Walks in Shadows response by female authors #The Cthulhu Mythos Megapack: 40 Modern and Classic Lovecraftian Stories #The Black Spider by Jeremias Gotthelf 1842 #Arthur Machen (1863-1947) (The Great God Pan, etc) #Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (The Horla, Carmilla, The Mother of Monstrosities, etc) #The Phantom Ship by Frederick Marryat #The Gothic Terror Megapack #Nathaniel Hathorne – Twice Told Tales: Young Goodman Brown, The Minister’s Black Veil #Washington Irving – The Money Diggers: The Devil and Tom Walker; The Legend of Sleepy Hollow #Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte 1847 #Oscar Wilde – Picture of Dorian Grey 1890 #Dracula – Bram Stoker 1897 #Henry James – Turn of the Screw 1898 #Heart of Darkness 1902 #Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951) The Next Generation and the Atomic Age: #Shirley Jackson - The Haunting of Hill House #Shirley Jackson – We Have Always Lived in the Castle 1962 #Shirley Jackson – The Lottery and Other Stories 1948 #Daphne du Maurier – The Birds and Other Stories #John Wyndham – Day of the Triffids 1951 #John Wyndham – The Chrysalids 1955 #Robert Bloch – Psycho #Richard Matheson – I Am Legend 1954 #On the Beach by Nevil Shute #Robert Aickman – Dark Entries 1964 or Sub Rosa 1968 #The October Country by Ray Bradbury #Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury Between the two eras we added a transition period where the optimism of the 60's died and ushered in the Satanic Panic that fueled much of the next era: #Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin 1967 #The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty 1971 Rise of the King: #A Night in Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny #The Land of Laughs by Jonathan Carroll #The Best of Joe R. Lansdale #My Best Friend’s Exorcism by Grady Hendrix (modern, but steeped in the 80’s) #Paperbacks from Hell by Grady Hendrix (nonfiction, but an excellent resource to cover the paperback boom) #Grimscribe by Thomas Ligotti (we had previously read Songs of a Dead Dreamer in an earlier phase) #The Secret of Ventriloquism by Jon Padgett (as resonance with Ligotti) #GRR Martin: Armageddon Rag + Sandkings + The Pear Shaped Man #Books of Blood 1-3 by Clive Barker #From Hell by Alan Moore 1999 #The Sandman by Neil Gaiman #Dark Forces edited by Kirby McCauley #Beloved by Toni Morrison 1987 #Salem’s Lot by Stephen King (we had read most of the other excellent examples of his work in the first phase, but missed this one) #Deliverance by James Dickey 1970 #Our Lady of Darkness by Fritz Leiber 1978 #Tanith Lee – Dark Dance or The Gorgon and Other Beastly Tales or Dreams of Dark and Light #T.E.D. Klein - Dark Gods 1986 or The Ceremonies 1984 #A Nest of Nightmares by Lisa Tuttle 1986 #Painted Devils by Robert Aickman 1979 #In a Lonely Place by Karl Edward Wagner 1983 #Ramsey Campbell (short fiction collection) #Octavia Butler – Bloodchild and Other Stories 1985-1995 or Fledgling 2005 Post-King: #For Mortal Things Unsung #World War Z 2006 #Laird Barron 2007-now ##The Imago Sequence and Other Stories ##The Croning #Joe Hill ##20th Century Ghosts is the natural choice, but we read that in a previous phase ##Locke & Key ##NOS4A2 #Coyote Tales by Jim Bihyeh (oral tradition – audio only) #David Nickle – Knife Fight and Other Struggles 2015 #Furnace by Livia Llewellyn #Orrin Grey #Eugie Foster #Damien Angelica Walters #Joyce Carol Oates #Closing Time and Other Stories by Jack Ketchum #The Bazaar of Bad Dreams by Stephen King (2015 short story collection) #Cell by Stephen King #Prodigal by Melanie Tem 2001 #Experimental Film by Gemma Files 2015 #House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski 2000 (700+ pages) #Let the Right One In –or-- Harbour by John Ajvide Lindqvist 2004 #Battle Royale by Koushun Takami 1999 #John Dies at the End 2001-2007 #Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer 2014 #Laundry Files 1 by Charles Stross 2004 #The Terror by Dan Simmons 2007 #A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay (2015 – Stoker winner and loved by most tastemakers) #Mongrels by Stephen Graham Jones 2015 #The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley 2014 #The Ritual by Adam Nevill 2011 #Seed of Destruction by Mike Mignola #Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff 2016 #Mira Grant (Seanan McGuire) Feed or Parasite Category:Blog posts